


Like Rabbit and Deer

by elo_elo



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, But only a little, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Eli Palmer absolutely is, Eli Palmer is the shit, Eventual Smut, F/M, Gentle Sex, Grief/Mourning, Healthy Relationships, Hurt/Comfort, Jacob Seed is a shit, Jacob Seed is not a good person, Kidnapping, Obsession, Older Man/Younger Woman, Possessive Behavior, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Torture, Rough Sex, Sexual Violence, Slow Burn, Smut, Stockholm Syndrome, Sweet Sex, Torture, Unhealthy Relationships, Unrequited Lust, Violence, dub con that edges up to non con, explicit descriptions of torture, lol, one of them dies, one of them doesn't, the graphic depictions are graphic, the tags are all over the place bc there are two relationships, they're both pretty hot, with some tenderness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:48:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22752040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elo_elo/pseuds/elo_elo
Summary: A car accident leaves Daisy Rook stranded and alone in Hope County just days after the cult takeover.As the county falls apart around her, she finds herself trapped in the Whitetail Mountains, caught between the attentions of two very different men.
Relationships: Eli Palmer/Original Female Character(s), Female Deputy | Judge/Jacob Seed, Jacob Seed/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 42
Kudos: 136





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *This chapter revised 8/18/20*

“It’s not supposed to rain like this in Montana.” Jules’ is leaned so far forward her chin nearly bumps the top of the steering wheel. Her hair’s scraped off her face, held back by an athletic headband, threadbare where she’s tucked it behind her ears a hundred times. Her jeep’s on cruise control but she’s still white-knuckling the wheel. Daisy can feel the sharp whip of her tension. A powder keg getting more and more explosive with each passing mile.

They’re out of snacks – everything they packed in LA ran out around the Utah border – and nearly out of caffeine. Jules melted down outside Casper, Wyoming when the little coffee shop they found a street down from the gas station didn’t have cold brew. That was about the time Daisy started suggesting motels. Quietly at first, just pointing out the squat little stucco or log buildings that started appearing with less and less frequency as they drove north. Then firmer, as storm clouds started crowding the horizon along the Idaho border. But they’re on a timeframe. And a budget. Which Jules reminded her as she sucked down a red bull at the last gas station they stopped at, tossing the can at the nearby dumpster and missing, not bothering to go pick it up. Daisy had let it go, not wanting to spike Jules’ already fraying temper. She got a few hours shallow sleep in the passenger’s seat, woke up to find the wind-whipped mesas she’d fallen asleep too now piney bluffs, snow-capped mountains in the distance. But now she’s wishing she pressed a little harder. Because the drizzle that started when they passed a faded old sign for a Whitetail State Park, has turned into a flood. Sheets and sheets of rain, so thick the view out the jeep’s windows is just a dark wash of greens and blues. Lightning streaks across the darkened sky, illuminating, for a moment a dark crop of pines. Daisy narrows her eyes, sure that there’s something hanging from one of the distant boughs. But the sky is dark before she can make it out. The clap of thunder makes them both flinch. Jules switches off cruise control, slows the car to a crawl. “Literally it is not supposed to rain like this in Montana.”

“Says who?” Daisy turns back to the map spread across her lap. They are, if she’s reading it right, smack in the middle of some state park she’s never heard of, hemmed in by mountains.

“I don’t know.” Jules gestures vaguely, eyes narrowed at the road. The cloud cover’s so dense it feels almost like night, their headlights pooling in the places where the asphalt has crumbled, warped. “ _People._ ” Daisy rolls her eyes, leans down to dig through her purse, finds her phone tucked at the very bottom. Zero bars now. It had been lingering at one for the last couple of hours. And while it’s not like she could really do anything with one bar, there’s something definitive about having no service at all. Daisy frowns, slipping her phone back into her purse. This is a good thing, she reminds herself, vacations are supposed to be like this. No Instagram, no email. _No 911._ She rubs the sleep from her eyes. It’ll be fine. They’ll be at Glacier National by tomorrow. Lots of other tourists, park rangers. The whole shebang. It’ll be fine. Jules taps her palms hard against the steering wheel, her frown deepening, creases between her brows with how hard she’s furrowing them. The simmer of her temper’s so big it fills the car. Daisy presses her shoulder to the door, leans a little toward the window. A chill has settled in the car, Daisy runs her fingers along the goosebumps now on her bare legs. Her hiking gear is in the back. She’d meant to wear it, but the day was so beautiful when they left Los Angeles, the sun so nice and warm on her skin. She’s regretting it now. The outside temperature reads 60 on the dash. “There’s like nobody fucking out here.” Jules leans back, the leg not on the gas bouncing so fast that Daisy turns to look back out the window. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single car in like who the fuck knows how long.”

Daisy folds up the map, sealing the neat creases with her fingers before slipping it back into the glove box. She pulls one leg up onto the seat, rests her chin on her bent knee. She rolls her fussy ankle, points and flexes the foot. What had been a watercolor of blues and greens is now just a continuous sheet of grey, the rain loud on the windshield, popping and spraying in all directions when they hit the hood of the jeep. If she squints, Daisy can imagine that they’re underwater, driving through a sandbar, fish drifting past. Alone out here, really alone. She glances over at Jules. “Wasn’t that the whole point of coming out here? No people.” Jules just scoffs. Daisy reaches over to try the radio. It conked out about an hour ago. Not even static, just silence, and without music the two of them had been forced to confront just how little they actually knew about each other. It’s been four years since they met beside the barre, four years of dancing on the corps together, and all those hours together at the studio fostered what Daisy now knows was a false sense of intimacy. A few weekends hikes in Runyon Canyon, as it turns out, do not a friendship make. Daisy cycles through a few channels, each clicks before going silent, a few pick up faint static.

Jules glances over. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for a weather report. Maybe a ranger station broadcast?” Daisy turns the dial again. “Something to tell is when this storm is supposed to end.”

“Huh.”

Daisy turns the dial again and the radio crackles to life. “Oh whoa.” At first, it’s only more of the same static, just louder. Daisy leans in. Under the static, so faint she’s not sure if she’s imagining it, voices. Singing. A melody. “Do you hear that?” Jules says nothing. Daisy turns up the volume and the singing becomes clearer, the static fading. The melody’s catchy, the lyrics vaguely pop-y, but it makes every hair on Daisy’s body stand on end. She changes the channel, finds more silence, exhales.

Jules scowls down at the radio. “What was that shit? Some kind of Christian rock?”

Daisy shrugs. “Probably. I don’t know. Maybe it’s some kind of local band.”

“Local to fucking where? Nobody lives out here.”

“I’m sure someone does.” Daisy looks back out her window. The rain has let up some, enough that she can see, a little, where they are. One side of the road edges up to jagged rockface, thick, trunked pines. The other side, her side, toward a gentle slope. And beyond it, nothing. Not a light for as far as she can see, no dark silhouette of a building. Nothing. Daisy squirms a little in her seat, glances back over at Jules. She’s right, they haven’t seen another car on the road. Not for hours. Daisy fidgets with the radio again, finding more static, more silence. “Maybe there’s…” she trails off, looking over out the window, looking over at Jules, “a weather bulletin?” Jules hands curl tighter around the wheel, the car serves a little as it hits a deep patch of water. “Why don’t we stop for the night?” Daisy turns to look behind her. The road disappears as they drive, fading into a wash of darkness. She straightens up, glances at Jules. “That town where we last got gas has to have a motel or something.”

“Not likely.”

“Why don’t we check?”

“I want to get to the park tonight.”

Daisy turns to look at her full on. “Glacier National Park is three hours from here. _At least._ I’m not even sure exactly where we are right now.”

Jules sniffs, never taking her eyes off the road. “I’m sick of driving.”

“Then let’s stop somewhere.”

“No.” Daisy watches her fingers tighten around the wheel, her shoulders tense. “We’re supposed to be on vacation. I want to hike. I want to see some fucking glaciers or whatever. I do _not_ want to spend the night in some shithole, nowhere town, okay?”

Daisy says nothing, pulling her other knee up to rest her chin on both, staring out over the dash at the rain, light enough now that she can see tall peaks looming in the distance, just a sliver of sky that she can see. Jules reaches over and tries to radio again, sighs loudly when she finds, like Daisy had, only silence. The trip had been spur of the moment, really. An off-hand comment at the barre one morning that turned into a few nights of furious texting, into scouring Airbnb for something cheap, something pretty. _We’re running away,_ Jules joked on the steps outside the studio as they piled their bags into her backseat, _never to be seen again._ But it’s only five days, just them taking advantage of a rare lull between shows. The last performance of Sleeping Beauty closed curtain three days ago and neither of them have Nutcracker rehearsals until two days after they’re supposed to be back. Daisy shifts her hips, tries to get the joint to pop, sore still. The engine whirrs, a wet sort of disjointed sound. Daisy glances over. Jules is leaning forward again, the muscles in her arms bulging with the force of how hard she’s holding the wheel. Daisy feels the jeep speed up, looking over the dash at the deep pools of water along the road. She uncurls her legs, sits up higher in her seat. “Hey.” Jules doesn’t even look at her. “ _Hey!_ ”

“What?”

“Slow down, okay? The road’s still shitty.” Jules says nothing, her speed ticks up. “Jesus Christ, Julia, just-“ The sound isn’t really like anything she’s ever heard before, takes the breath right out of her lungs. Wet and slick and sharp. The car skids hard, its back wheels spinning out and suddenly Daisy is facing the direction they’ve just come, that long line of disappearing road. She’s screaming or maybe Jules is and then no one is. A silence so complete it drowns out her thoughts. The air slows around her, her hair drifting out in front of her, her hands floating in an air that is so thick she can’t breathe it in. And then she exhales, the seatbelt digging hard into her skin, and her breath plumes out in front of her. There’s the sound of metal on metal so loud she tries to cover her ears but can’t seem to gather her hands. And then it’s all a rush. A wet chill all around her, her hands against asphalt. The sky suddenly so enormous, so vast that it looks alien, hemmed in by the tall points of pines. She's on her back now. She can’t seem to close her eyes, rain pooling under her eyelids, droplets hanging from her lashes. And then all she can do is close her eyes, close her eyes and curl in on herself as pain rolls up her arm, spreads out through the rest of her until she’s bucked against the ground. Asphalt. She can feel the cracks in the road against her skin and tries to wonder when she got out of the car, but her thoughts have no traction. Each one feels like a passing bomb. Daisy curls, twists, like she’s fleeing the pain, like she’s trying to run. There’s no light beyond her closed eyelids and the rain has started to fall again. Her clothes are heavy on her. When she breathes, she tastes water. It’s off, mineral-y. The air smells like pine and the tang of rain. Like gasoline. Like something burning. _Just a minute._ She closes her fingers around rock. _Just give me a minute. Just hold on, please._

It’s the pain that brings her back, duller now. One side of her heavy, sticky. She doesn’t look. Opens her eyes and pushes herself onto her shins with the arm that doesn’t feel like an ache. The rain’s gone but the clouds have stayed. A heavy fog slips from between the pines, off the rocks, and onto the road. Daisy’s never felt something like this, a quiet so thick she could reach out and take it between her fingers. A bird calls from far away, the fog seems to have a melody all its own. And there’s a sizzle. Daisy frowns at it. It’s like eggs in a pan, a rush of steam. It doesn’t fit and she doesn’t know why. She feels it like an echo. And then her brain reunites hard with her body. And then she sees the car.

It’s tipped a little over in the ditch, the side where she’d been sitting ripped open, metal jagged like a row of teeth. Smoke rises from the center, billowing over the tires. And it’s the smoke that brings her to her feet. A sudden, panicked, urgent feeling vibrating through her whole body. Daisy weaves a little in the road before she finds her footing, one arm tucked tightly to her chest. “Jules?” Her voice is swallowed up by the loud hiss of the engine and that, _that_ sends a spike of terror through her. “Jules!” The car’s hot to the touch when she reaches it and for a moment, she recoils, just standing beside the wreckage. The engine pops. She climbs up onto the side. “Jules!”

The fog has settled too in the jeep, but even through it Daisy can see her outline. Her name echoes across the seat, the shattered windshield. Jules doesn’t move. Her hair swings in the air, her seatbelt creaking with each movement. Daisy can’t tell up from down, can’t reach no matter how hard she tries. She screams Jules’ name and then she just screams, pulling herself out of the jeep, landing on the road, faltering, falling, Her scream echoes and echoes and echoes. There’s blood smeared on her thighs. She thinks it can’t be her own. Her arm throbs. And then she hears the radio. That station. That melody again. She can hear it louder now. And in front of her, not from the jeep. There’s a truck just idling in the road. A man behind the wheel, a man crouched in the bed. Both watching the jeep smoke. Daisy opens her mouth, makes a sound that doesn’t become words. They look at her, one after the other. The truck revs its engine, spraying mud and water as its tires spin out on the road. She watches it disappear down the road, mouth still hung open. The engine pops. She doesn’t hear the creak of the seatbelt anymore. Daisy can feel her heart like she never had before, can feel it beating in every part of her, her palm pulsing against the cracked asphalt.

Another truck comes careening down the road, music blaring. This one she recognizes even if she can’t put her finger on the name. Screaming vocals, a mashing guitar sound. It comes screeching to a halt, the back end kicking up mud, the music cutting off mid-word. Daisy’s lungs feel tight, wrong. Like she’s slowly suffocating. She doesn’t move, still holding one arm to her chest. Looks up only when she hears the truck’s door slam. The driver looks like a kid, like he’s barely over eighteen and, for a moment that feels stretched out and thick and hazy, they just stare at each other. Then he exhales, the dark braids over each shoulder shifting as he crouches down in front of her. “Shit.” He glances over her shoulder at the jeep. “Fuck _shit._ ” He takes her by the shoulders, leans down more so they’re eye to eye. “Are you okay?” Daisy blinks. She opens her mouth. Nothing comes out. Her lips tremble. “Yeah, dumb fucking question, I know.” The engine pops again, the hiss of steam louder now. He glances up, squeezes her shoulders, then releases them. “Fucking shit.” He stands, looks down at her. “Stay here, okay? Just hold on,” Daisy listens to his footsteps on the road, listens to the groan of the metal. His voice echoes across the empty road. “ _Fuck!_ ”

He’s back sooner than she expects, hands under her arms, easing her up. “We gotta go, okay? We’re gonna get you out of here.”

Daisy goes rigid. “My friend.” She squirms in his grip. “Where’s my friend?” She looks at him, pleading. The skin of her cheeks feels tight. She’s been crying, maybe the whole time. “We have to get my friend.” He doesn’t turn back toward the car, he doesn’t let go of her, just slots her under his arm, pulling her gently toward the truck. There’s a look in his eyes that cracks open new terror inside of her. “Are you listening to me!?” Her voice triples in the air. A bird takes flight from the pines.

The man turns, holds her by the shoulders. She watches his adam’s apple bob. He’s tall as a reed and ducks down so their eyes meet. “She doesn’t need help anymore, okay? But you do.” His grip on her shoulders tightens. “Okay? We’ll come back in the morning and bury her. Okay?”

Daisy blinks. The fog has settled so heavily around them that she can barely see the road. “Bury her?” But he’s moving again, easing her toward the truck. “Shouldn’t we….” She clutches her hand to her chest. Her skin feels too hot and too cold, too real and nothing like her own skin at all. “What if we called…” He squeezes her arm. He smells like dish soap, a sudden overpowering hit of body spray. Alcohol and tannin and sweet. All the ways boys used to smell in high school. She wonders if maybe she’s still in high school. If maybe she’s been dreaming. If she still is. The engine pops behind her. He helps her into the high cab of the truck. Daisy watches the steam turn to smoke, watches the car start to burn.

The shock’s worn off. Some. A little. She can think now, at least, even if all of her thoughts seem outside of herself. She’s underground. How far underground it’s hard to tell. She’d panicked a little on the stairs. Something about the lonely quiet along the mountaintop, the thickness of those metal doors jutting out of the rock. But it’s quiet now. In her head. Even though it shouldn’t be. Even though every time she closes her eyes, she can a wave of water rushing across the dash, can see the seatbelt pulled tight, creaking back and forth. There’s a rifle on the ground, stack of bullets by an old TV on a wooden stand that reminds her, a little of her grandmother’s house. Not the bullets, of course, her brain isn't sure what exactly to do with those. The fabric of the couch has been worn soft, the cushion where he put her has a dip in the middle. There’s a map of Montana above the tv. She is three and a half hours from Glacier National Park. The walls look like corkboard.

The man who picked her up comes in through one of the doors. It’s hard to tell but Daisy thinks there might be a lot of people down here. She can hear distant chatter, the crackle of a radio. He sets a camping canteen down on the floor beside her feet. “You should drink some water.” He says with a quick nod. He _is_ young. She can see that now for sure. He fidgets with his ballcap. Turns it forwards, then back. He bounces a little on his feet then reaches over for a blanket on the end of the couch. “I’m just gonna…” He lays it gently over her shoulders. The fabric scratches but it’s warm and it’s only then Daisy realizes just how cold she is, her body clicking back on again. She brings her arm closer to her chest. He nods at it. “How’s the um…” He trails off, sniffing, adjusting his cap again. Daisy hasn’t looked at it. Her arm. It’s aches, sticky and heavy. In the car on the way up the mountain, he’d wrapped a t-shirt around it. The tips of her fingers have gone a little numb. “Tammy used to be a nurse, so…like don’t worry. She’s gonna look at it.” He bounces a little on the balls of his feet. “I’m Wheaty by the way.” He rubs at his neck. Daisy just stares, her tongue dead in her mouth, like the scream took everything out of her, fried her vocal cords. She can hear loud footsteps just beyond the wall and Wheaty straightens up. “Eli! She’s in here!”

Daisy’s first instinct is to flinch. To recoil from the man who appears in the doorway. He’s tall, broad, his dark hair wild around his face, thick beard caked in mud. He’s dressed in camouflage fatigues and she watches as he pulls a bow from his back, lays it gingerly on the ground. And maybe that’s it, the smooth, gentle movement, that makes her shoulders unclench. She exhales. He pats Wheaty on the shoulder then crouches down level with Daisy. He has kind eyes. She doesn’t know what’s making her think that. “Hi there.” There’s a smoke to his voice. He smells like earth, like musk. She can’t open her mouth; she can’t feel any part of herself. She clutches her hands tighter to her chest. Eli looks closely at her then turns back to Wheaty. “She’s in shock.”

Wheaty sniffs. “Thought so, yeah.”

“We need to get her legs elevated.” He pats her lightly on the knee, nods just once. “You’re gonna be okay, sweetheart. Whitetail’s gotcha now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3 
> 
> I’ve always been really, really into the dichotomy between Jacob and Eli. They’re both militant guys, both counter-culture and yet so completely different in their temperament and methods. I hope you enjoy <3


	2. Chapter 2

She might be dead. The thought surfaces as the engine of Wheaty’s truck turns over. Daisy looks down at her hands. They look strange. Smaller than she remembers, like they don’t belong to her. She’s _probably_ dead actually, remembers that acrid smell of gasoline as she’d laid in the road. She stares out at the mountain range carving up the horizon in front of her. Panic flares briefly up inside of her, then fades, muted. She glances over at Wheaty. He looks flustered, a livid blush crawling up his neck. She tries to surreptitiously check her pulse as the truck crawls down a narrow mountain road the horizon lost among the trees. It thrums under her fingertips, but her fingers feel far away too and the way the truck is jostling them feels almost like a heartbeat. The idea doesn’t scare her like maybe it should, honestly it makes it a lot easier to accept what Wheaty is telling her.

She is, admittedly, only half listening as they drive slowly along a dirt mountain road, the incline so steep her body presses up against the seatbelt. It hurts, but she doesn’t move to stop it.. There’s a cult, she’s gleaned that. It’s not really sticking though, that idea. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Daisy tries, as Wheaty idles the truck in a clearing, to remember everything she’s ever heard about cults. She listened to a podcast on Heaven’s Gate once, just sort of half-assed, something to listen to as she stretched, when she’d ice her feet after rehearsal. She remembers that they put bags over their heads, wore matching shoes as they all laid down to die. Wheaty kills the engine, takes a pistol from the center console. “I’m gonna take a look around okay? I’ll be right back.” He turns to look back at her and there’s a sweetness in his eyes that catches her off guard. She doesn’t know how to process it, sits stony in the passenger’s seat. “Stay here, okay? Stay quiet.” Wheaty glances back. “If somebody comes here, if they don’t look like a Whitetail, scream okay? Just scream.” She nods, hugging her knees to her chest.

Daisy watches as Wheaty crouches in the brush, watches his back disappear into the line of trees beside the road. She watched a documentary once on Waco. Or well, it had been playing in the background at a party, but she remembers glancing back – glass of wine in her hand, the gossamer fabric of her dress brushing against her bare thighs as a breeze rolled in from the palm-lined street outside – and seeing smoke billowing from windows on the tv, a building engulfed in flame. Daisy holds herself closer. They’d dressed her in a pair of cargo pants, so big that Wheaty had to poke another hole in the belt they gave her just so they would stay up. The shirt is too big too, smells like stale dyer sheets and cigarettes. It’s got a pair of antlers on the front. _Resist Repel Remain_ printed underneath. She clings to it, resting her head on her knees.

A bird calls from a far-off tree. Goosebumps race up her skin. All of Daisy’s thoughts feel like they’re behind glass. They scream and they cry and they pound on the barrier, but she can’t feel a thing, can’t work through them. She sits like a child in the passenger’s seat, watching everything, understanding nothing.

She jumps when Wheaty opens the car door. She hadn’t seen him come back, has absolutely no sense of how much time has passed since he left the car. “Hey,” he says, voice just above a whisper, “the coast looks pretty clear. If we work quick, we can get her out of here.” Wheaty pulls a pistol from the waist of his pants and holds it out to her. “You know how to use one of these?” Daisy just stares at him. Wheaty swallows hard, tucking the gun back into his belt. “Right, gotcha. Well, just stick close to me okay?” Daisy nods, reaching over to unbuckle her seatbelt. Wheaty wavers at the open door. “Listen, I think I can handle this on my own. You can just wait in the truck if you want.”

“No.” Daisy sniffs. Her face feels numb, detached from the rest of her. “I’ll go.” She slides out of the truck, landing hard on the uneven ground. Wheaty waits patiently at the front of the truck, one hand on his gun, the other sort of awkwardly at his side. “Thank you.” He nods, eager as a kid. They start down through the undergrowth toward the road.

Daisy is not dead. It’s the first clear thought she’s had since yesterday and she has it as she retches bile on the shoulder of the highway. Wheaty is keeping his distance, pacing around the wreckage. “We should hurry,” he says quietly. Daisy nods, sitting back up, wiping her face with her uninjured arm. She looks back. No, Daisy is not dead, because death is staring her now in the face. It’s the way Jules’ lips have shrunken away from her teeth, like a wide grin. The way her hands are marbled blue, her arms stuck at rigid ninety-degree angles, like an old barbie. Daisy swallows bile, her hand coming to press softly against her ribs, soothing. Checking too. That her heart is still beating, that her skin is still warm. Wheaty glances one way down the road, then the other, cocks his gun. Every step she takes toward Jules feels slower than the last. The gas smell is worse than she remembers. There’s a big pool of it beside the overturned car, tacky and dark where it clings to the grass along the highway. It stains her sneakers as she walks back onto the road. “Can you help me lift her?” Daisy nods. She braces herself, reaches down to slip her hands under her arms. Her skin is cool to the touch, gives easily under Daisy’s fingers. Wheaty wraps his arms around her legs. “Okay. On my count. One.” The sky is a brilliant blue, no trace left of that horrible storm. “Two.” The wreckage is so quiet. No longer smoldering. A dead, cold thing. “Three.” Daisy retches again. The smell is terrible. Like urine, like greens left in the fridge to rot, like something vaguely sweet, just turned. Daisy grips Jules’ arms tighter, her nails digging into the softening flesh, and spits bile onto the asphalt. “The first one is always the hardest.” Daisy says nothing to that, doesn’t even know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean.

Jules’s body is in the bed of the trunk. Eli, apparently, thinks it’s best to bury the body away from the crash site. Daisy doesn’t care. She’s still trying to process the transition from person to corpse. Sometimes when Wheaty takes a turn hard, it will make a wet thunk as it rolls to one side. She and Jules stopped at the Tree of Utah on the way up. A towering concrete sculpture standing in the flat plains of the desert, the mountains small and distant behind it. They’d sat on the hood of her car, watch the sun stretch long across the cloudless sky as they split a gas station bag of pretzels. Daisy can’t remember what they talked about and when she tries, all she can see is Jules’ pale lips pulling away from her teeth, one torn open Daisy’s stomach roils, she holds herself a little closer. Her duffle bag is in the backseat of the truck. They’d found it, almost pristine, a few feet away from wreckage. Funny that. The flimsy things came out unscathed. Pain shoots up her arm. Daisy flinches, presses down on it. They pass a road sign. 82 miles to Missoula, 195 miles to Helena, 182 miles to Spokane. “Wheaty.” He nearly rockets out of his seat. She figures that’s fair. She hasn’t said hardly more than a word to him. “I have to get out of here.”

Wheaty laughs a little weakly. “Yeah well, you and me both.”

“I’m serious.”

He glances over at her. Their eyes meet. He looks young. Maybe even younger than her. Maybe even still a teenager. He fidgets with the beads around his neck. “Yeah, I know. I don’t think you can though. Not while the cult is in control of the roads.”

“I got in.” She swallows. “ _We_ got in.”

“Yeah and that’s kind of the fucked up mystery. No one’s been in or out of the county in weeks. Eli thinks it must have been the storm, you somehow slipped their net.”

“We got in.” Daisy pulls her knees against her chest, staring unseeing out over the dash. “We,” she flinches, “ _I_ can get back out again.”

Wheaty frowns, tapping his hand on the steering wheel. “I don’t really think that’s gonna happen.” Daisy rests her cheek on her knees, closing her eyes. “Sorry.”

“We didn’t tell anyone where we were going.”

Wheaty’s quiet for a beat. “What?”

Daisy sniffs, opens her eyes again. They’re back on that narrow, unpaved mountain road. The body in the back thump, thump, thumps as they drive. “We’re supposed to be back in LA next week, but we didn’t tell anyone where we were going. No one knows where we are.” Her chest tightens. That had been Jules’ idea, this whole thing has been Jules’ idea. “Where _I_ am.”

The bathroom is the size of a closet. Probably _was_ a closet, judging by the metal shelves along one wall. But it’s clean. Enough. Daisy exhales, closes her eyes to let the water flow over her face. She wonders, as she presses her fingers to the concrete walls, what this place where she is now was supposed to be before it became this. Maybe it was always supposed to be this. Daisy opens her eyes, wipes the water from them. She flinches, that sizzles echoing in her mind, the faint smell of gasoline. Her hands look marbled, blue. She gasps, curling her fingers into fists. When she looks again, her skin’s returned to its normal color. Daisy takes a deep breath and focuses on scrubbing her scalp, goes at it a little too hard with her nails. The water’s tepid, chilly sometimes like it’s pulling from some uneven well, but it seems clean and Daisy finds herself grateful for it. Grateful to wash the grime off her, to wash that whole day away.

She shuts the water off and listens to it drip cold and metallic on the concrete floor. Her fingers trail up her body; it’s numb but waking up, aching bruises and cuts that sting when her fingertips find them. Her body feels like a little animal, like something separate from her. When she closes her eyes, she can see herself again in the air, can feel that cold rain. It’s like she left her body then and she’s still trying to get back to it.

Daisy squeezes the water from her hair, pushes the plastic curtain aside, the rusted bar it’s strung from creaking as she does. The floor is chilled under her feet and so she wraps the towel around herself. She has the sudden urge to crouch onto the floor, to hide her whole self under the worn fabric. Instead, she heads to the mirror. There’s a pot of fake flowers on the shelf above the toilet, a crusty bottle of bleach. Her reflection is, more or less, what she expected. Her bottom lip split, bloody and scabbed, and just above it, a livid bruise that blooms across her cheekbone, ending just beneath her eye. She's got a set of scratches on her left shoulder, a dark bruise on her left side. And then the cut, all down her right forearm, angry and throbbing. Daisy wipes at her cheeks. She isn’t really sure when she started crying, isn’t sure if this even really is crying. She turns her back on the mirror, grabs for the jeans she’d folded neatly on one of the shelves. Her left thigh is tender as she pulls her jeans up, a deep bruise just above the knee, a scratch like a burn where she’d skidded across the asphalt.

But more than that, the jeans feel strange on her. She wore them last to a party just before they left. There’s a little stain on a belt buckle where she brushed up against spilled red wine. It’s hard to make sense of it. She stops trying to.

Daisy can hear, outside the bathroom, that someone’s put a record on. Probably Wheaty. Knows that unmistakable scratch before the song starts. She knows the song too. Right away. Bad Moon Rising. Creedance Clearwater Revival. Her dad used to listen to this record. Used to put it on when he did the dishes, singing along off-key. Daisy sniffs. She scraps back her hair, looking again in the mirror. She still looks like herself, there’s that at least.

Wheaty finds her as she's leaving the bathroom, still tucking her sweater into the high hem of her jeans. “Hey.”

She wavers. “Hi.”

He doesn’t make eye contact with her, looks sheepishly a little off to the side. Daisy isn’t sure if it’s because of what they did this morning or if it’s because he really is just a kid. “Eli wants to talk to you.”

Daisy straightens up. “Oh.”

Wheaty nods behind him, adjusting his backward ballcap. “He’s in the front room.”

Eli has mud on his boots, on the bottoms of his pants. She looks at it before she looks at the rest of him. Isn’t totally sure what she should make of it. Then her eyes drift up, find his face. He isn’t smiling but there’s something patient in his expression, soft. He nods behind him. “Let’s go for a talk.” She blinks, not moving. Eli cocks his head a little. “That alright?”

Daisy has to look up at him, the top of her head just barely reaches his nose. “Yeah, sorry.”

He offers to help her up the ladder. It’s sort of nice, sort of offensive. She wants to tell him that she could probably shimmy up it with one hand, but…she doesn’t really want to talk about work. Or anything, actually . So she just says _thank you, I’m fine_ and starts up. She wonders, as she climbs, if all the pushing through pain she’s done as a dancer is the reason her body doesn’t feel worse. If there’s going to be a moment, like those minutes just after the end of a performance when the adrenaline’s starting to wear off, when her body is going to start screaming. And that wondering distracts her long enough to miss a rung. She yelps, losing her balance, but Eli’s hands are steady on her waist. “I got ya.” She exhales, a little shaky. “Just keep moving. I got ya right here.” He has big hands, warm hands. She shakes the thought off her, hoisting herself up out of the bunker, wincing as her ribs protest the way she’s moving. The air is clear up here, clean and crisp and nice, tinged with pine and cedar. This is exactly what they’d been looking for when they came out here. Quiet, expansive vistas. Peace. Eli groans as he swings up the ladder behind her. “Just wanted to touch base.” He wipes his hands on his pants. “Thought you might like some fresh air. Bunker can get a little…ripe.” Daisy glances over her shoulder at him. In the sunlight, she can see the rich color of his dark hair, his skin ruddy and tanned from what must be hours under the sun. He nods for her to follow. She does, pulling her sweater a little closer around her.

They walk up a narrow path, hemmed in by craggy boulders and squat scrub trees. Every so often, Eli will glance behind him, to make sure she’s still on the path. He’s agile, quick. A big man but with a quiet sort of grace. He’s got a bow strung across his back. Something she’d noticed but only now understands the magnitude of. They’re killing people out here. Or trying to, at least. Before her shower, she’d watched Wheaty sort bullets, humming quietly to the record he put on.

Daisy gasps when she reaches the top of the trail. It takes her by surprise. The mountain range seems to go on forever, its peaks skimming the brilliant, cloudless sky. In the distance, a shimmering lake. A quilt of pines and scrub; dark greens and ochre. Daisy feels high up, like she could take flight. “Pretty up here, isn’t it? Peaceful.” He frowns. “Or it used to be.” She can see a plume of dark smoke beyond the lake. The cult, she assumes, though it still feels almost fanciful to think about. Unreal. Eli settles on a boulder, nods for her to do the same on the one opposite. “I like to come up here to think.” Daisy watches him owlishly from her spot on the boulder, pulls her knees up to her chest. “Now,” Eli says on a heavy breath, “with all the commotion, I didn’t get your name.”

She swallows hard. “Daisy.”

He nods. “Daisy. Alright. Eli Palmer. I’m the head of the Whitetail Militia. And this is our home base.” _Militia._ The word makes her think of standoffs and news camera and shouting, frothing old men dressed in camouflage. But the thoughts are fleeting. The sun is warm on her skin and a heavy weariness settles over her. Maybe Eli expected her to say something to that. Or maybe he didn’t. He produces a hunting knife from his pocket and starts chipping away at a twig. Something to keep his hands busy, Daisy guesses. He’s got long fingers. Callouses. Maybe from the bow, maybe from something else. He changes the subject. “Wheaty get you something to eat?”

“Yeah, he did.” She can’t remember what it was, but she remembers eating it. Sitting across the table from Wheaty, the woman named Tammy glowering at her from beside the kitchen sink.

“That’s good.” Eli stands, then nods toward her bandaged arm. “You mind if I take a look?”

She glances down at her arm, the sweater covering the wound and the bandages around it. “Oh, um, sure. Yeah.”

He crouches down in front of her, gently pushing the sleeve of her sweater up to her elbow. With well-practiced hands, he unravels the bandage. She flinches when she sees it, the sort of rotten color of the blood seeping through the white, and Eli glances up at her. “Hurtin’ ya?”

“No, just um…” She trails off, but he just nods, like he understands. He’s handsome up close, once you can get past his rugged exterior. High cheekbones; a nice nose, scar across the bridge of it, probably from an old break. Eli turns her arm a little, looks up like he wants to gauge her reaction. She nods, he continues. He’s got soulful eyes, heavy-lidded, a pale sage green. Daisy sniffles, then immediately stiffens. She doesn’t want to cry at all, but especially not in front of someone like Eli. She’s not even sure where the tears threatening now are coming from. But if Eli notices, he doesn’t draw attention to it. Instead, he sits back on his haunches, digging through his pack until he finds a roll of fresh bandages. He’s got tattoos on both forearms. She hadn’t noticed them before but looks now with great interest. On the right a stylized American eagle, its wings spread, head back, tongue out. A banner wraps around its wings. _Potius morī quam perdere lībertātem_. Latin. she thinks, but she doesn’t know for what. The one on his other arm is too faded for her to make out. “It’s not too deep.” His voice startles her and he sets a hand gently on her knee to settle her. “You got lucky. A lot of your wounds are superficial. Just got a little beat up.” He looks up at her, then up at the sky. “Little sunshine’s good for healing. You’ll be back on your feet in no time.” He smiles and there’s something rare about it. Daisy gets the distinct impression he doesn’t do it very often.

Eli holds her arm in his palm, keeps it steady on his bent leg and Daisy lets her eyes flutter closed. His touch is mollifying. She feels like she can breathe, like her lungs are open again. “Wheaty says you aren’t local.” Daisy opens her eyes. “So where are you from?”

“Los Angeles.”

Eli whistles. “Long way from home.” Her chest tightens. He releases her arm, sets it gently in her lap, smoothing her sweater sleeve back down over the fresh bandages. Eli clears his throat. “I know it must feel like you just woke up in hell, but I _will_ keep you safe.” Daisy looks at him, really looks at him. There’s a determination in his face that feels as overwhelming as it does reassuring. “I can promise you that. And when this is all over, we’ll get you headed back to where you belong, alright?”

Daisy takes a deep breath. “Thank you.”

Eli pats her on the knee, groaning as he stands. “Jacob’s patrols usually hit this side of the mountain around noon. Better head inside.” Daisy doesn’t ask who Jacob is, just takes Eli’s hand when he offers it, pulling her up onto her feet. 

They’ve moved her into the main room. A bottom bunk against the wall across from the kitchen, kitty-corner from the tv and couch. And as she lays, wrapped in a sleeping bag, she feels almost cocooned, cradled. Hidden away like a little animal. And Daisy starts to drift off, clutching the lumpy pillow they gave her tightly to her body. One of the men from the militia wanders in, rustles around in the refrigerator. She opens one eye to look at him. The low light coming from the stove keeps the room just a little lit. The hall light flickering. The man’s whistling something soft and easy, folksy. She watches as he pulls a carton of eggs from the fridge, listens to the stove come crackling to life. Daisy’s eyes feel heavy. She lets them close, lets her breathing slow. She hears the man crack a couple eggs. The tune he’s whistling gets softer, almost mournful. With her eyes closed, her thoughts jumble. She remembers propping her feet up on the dash of Jules’ car, laughing at Mormon radio as they left the Salt Lake city limits, passing a bag of funyuns back and forth. Then she remembers the feel of Jules’ skin under her fingers. The give of it. The stillness. Daisy rolls onto her front, burying her head in the pillow, heart pounding again. She presses her hand to her mouth, feels tears come rolling across her fingers. “You’re up late.” Daisy stills. She glances over toward the kitchen again. Eli has come wandering in. She can see, even from far away, that his fatigues are caked in dirt. He stretches, arms overhead, shirt coming up to reveal the hard muscles of his stomach. Then he pats the man affectionately on his shoulder. “Get some rest,” he says, that smooth rumble of his voice just as soothing as his touch had been, “we all need it.” Daisy closes her eyes. She clutches the pillow tighter to her. The eggs sizzle in the pan, the military clock on the wall ticks. She inhales, counts to ten, exhales. Ballet taught her to ignore the pain in her body, to harness it. To create. She can do that. She can bend herself into all kinds of shapes. She can get out of here. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3 <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, mind the tags <3

Tammy mentions it off-hand the next morning. Not to Daisy directly, Tammy seems to be giving her a wide berth, but to Eli. Who Daisy has been watching like a hawk. Mostly because there’s something about him that keeps her settled, an easy confidence that she wants to take between her fingers, wants to soak up. He’s leaning against a table heavy with maps, eating some of the bland, stodgy oatmeal one of the others made a big pot of before Daisy woke up. “Broke his fucking leg. Out of commission for weeks, maybe months.” Daisy perks up. She’s sitting on the edge of Wheaty’s table between two crates of records and a tall metal table lamp, her mostly uneaten oatmeal sitting in her lap “It’s too slick.”

Eli sets his bowl of oatmeal down, wipes at his mouth with his hand, sighing. “Shouldn’t be.”

“Well, it is.”

“ _Shouldn’t be_.” He turns to face the camera feeds opposite the table. Grainy black and white monitors Daisy stumbled upon this morning on her way to the bathroom. “The sun’s been out for two goddamn days.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Eli.”

Daisy leans over toward Wheaty, her voice a whisper. “Wheaty.” He jumps, nearly dropping one of the records he’s sorting. “What are they talking about?”

For a moment, he just looks at her. Then he straightens up. “Oh, um,” he cocks his head to listen. Then he slips the final record into his crate. “They’re talking about the radio bullshit.” Daisy raises an eyebrow. Wheaty clears his throat. “The cult’s been jamming communications. Have these like, I don’t know, devices on all the radios in the county.”

Daisy runs her hands down her thighs. Rolling her thumbs over the fabric. Soothing. Trying to be at least. Her body is still numb, like a heavy, unwieldy extension of herself, but her brain has snapped back, at least mostly. And a quiet terror has started to simmer at the back of her brain, one she’s trying hard to keep at bay. “What does that, like, mean?”

“It means we can’t get word out.”

Daisy frowns, the gears turning in her head. “So we could? Get word out?” She turns to face him more fully, wincing as her ribs protest the sudden movement. “If someone fixed the towers or whatever?”

Wheaty shrugs. “Yeah, honestly, it would solve a lot of our fucking problems.” Then he looks almost sheepish, shrugging again. “I think.”

Daisy turns back to watch Eli and Tammy’s heated argument. They’re snipping at each other from across the table until Eli throws up his hands, turns his attention back to the radio beside his monitors. Tammy stalks off to the room at the back. “Why haven’t they then?”

“Nobody can get up there. It’s like really steep and like moves and shit.” Wheaty adjusts his hat. “You’d have to be some kind of like acrobat, to get up there.” Daisy isn’t totally sure what feeling rushes through her in that moment, just that she’s never felt it before. Not quite like this. An urgency that rushes almost painfully through her body, tinged with fear, blunted by that numbness that still sits inside of her. _I’m that,_ she wants to tell him, _I can do all_ that.But her tongue is heavy in her mouth.

She looks over at him. “Do you know where it is?”

He nods toward Eli. “This tower?” Daisy nods. “Yeah, it’s like a couple dozen meters north of here.” He squints at her. “Why?”

“No reason.” She runs her fingers across her thighs, those short, soothing circles. It almost works.

It’s easier to do than she expects. Leaving. She isn’t totally sure what made her think she had to stay in the confines of the bunker. Maybe it was the guns. Or maybe it just hadn’t occurred to her until the seed of her idea began to stir that the outside world still existed beyond those storm doors. There’s part of her, probably, that still isn’t sure if this is all quite real. Some part of her that thinks, hopes maybe, that she’s still in the car with Jules, dozing as they head north, all of this some strange, off-kilter dream. Still though, she holds her breath as she passes the stockpile near the entrance. “Just heading out for some fresh air.” She tells the woman sitting behind the counter, cleaning a rifle.

“Careful now,” the woman says, but Daisy is already halfway up the steps, her skin prickling in the cool night air. Her steps are quiet. That part is easy for her. She’s spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours on stage perfecting just that. Making her body elegant, unobtrusive. She can stalk quietly through this forest and even though she doesn’t know which direction is north, that doesn’t worry her. The terror simmering just under the surface won’t, or can’t, break through.

So she doesn’t know where she’s going, but she knows, at least sort of, what she’s looking for. She’d prodded Wheaty a little over dinner. Doesn’t remember what they ate, just that he’d stared hard at it while she talked. But she had gotten some things out of him and now, as she moves silently through the underbrush, she knows she’s looking for a blinking, yellow light. She passes a mound of disturbed dirt as she goes, tucked just under one of the tall pines near the entrance to the Den. She tells herself not to look at it, but her eyes drift over. Someone has erected a small cross; someone has left a few flowers. She looks away, her heart pounds in her fingers.

Daisy feels her way along a rock face, eyes still adjusting the dense darkness now that she’s left the quiet light of the Wolf Den behind. It occurs to her as she heads down a narrow path that she could fall, that she could go tumbling to her death. The thought feels strange, separate from her. She keeps going until she reaches a dirt road and then, when she turns to look up it, she sees it. A blinking light, just above the treetops. She exhales, tries to still the trembling she can’t quite seem to shake. 

Her eyes have adjusted by the time she reaches the radio tower. It’s tall and as the wind rustles the pines, she sees it sway, the light blinking as pine boughs brush across it. It’s easy to lift herself over the chain-link fence around it even with her bruised and battered body protesting each little movement. The first rung is easy too. The metal is cold against her skin and she feels an ache as she hoists herself up. It’s easy to ignore. That sense of urgency is roiling through her now. She just has to get to the top. If she gets to the top, if she does…whatever the fuck she has to do up there, then this, this nightmare, will be over. She can go back home. Go back to the studio. Back to her life. The wind picks up and Daisy imagines the petals those of flowers someone left over Jules are fluttering in it. She nearly loses her balance, pulls her body tightly to the metal. It groans in the wind, her face pressed to it, skin tight from tears she hadn’t even realized had been falling. She can go back to _some_ of her life. She hangs there for a moment, legs dangling, then with a quiet groan, pulls herself to the top. Daisy has to grip the center beam as the top sways at the mercy of another strong, chilled wind, but her balance holds. And it’s then, balancing here on the top of this tower, that Daisy realizes she has no idea what to do with the tiny, beeping box that’s been sautered to the top of the tower. She yanks at it, digging her nails into the seams of the metal box. It holds, one of her nails breaks. She curses, sticking that finger into her mouth. She tastes blood, rips her finger from her mouth.

Daisy pulls her phone from her back pocket. It’s shattered on one side. No service. Almost dead. But the flashlight still works, and she shines it on the box. Wheaty called it a jammer and though the rusted yellow device doesn’t look all that complex it occurs to Daisy that if she just yanks the thing off, she might take the radio with it. She yanks at it again. It doesn’t budge and Daisy curses, those tears flowing down her cheeks again. This was stupid. Naïve. Dangerous even. And as a chilly wind sends the tower groaning and swaying again, Daisy finds herself back in her body. Slams hard into her own skin. And suddenly everything hurts and that fear that has been bubbling just under the surface spills over.

Daisy clutches at the metal, her breath stuttering. She wipes again at her cheeks, wishing now that she’d brought one of the Whitetails, at least talked to them about this. Why on earth hadn’t she done that? She breathes hard through her nose, resting her head on the cool metal. Ten counts in, ten counts out. She pats the metal, leans a little back. The tower groans, sways. She keeps her balance. At least now she can tell them she can get up the tower, can have someone tell her what to do. Ten counts in, ten counts out. She braces herself against the center bar, then starts down.

The moon is hanging high in the sky when she makes it back to the ground, up above the treetops. She’s never seen it this big before. Or this yellow. Like an omen. Like something from a movie. Daisy stands for a moment, just letting its glow wash over her, so enraptured that even though she hears the tires crunching over gravel, the sound doesn’t sink in. Not until a man yanks her from her feet does she realize that she’s not alone. Every hair on her body stands on end; she curls away like a frightened cat, digs her nails into his skin, squirming in his grip. “Let go!”

And he does, but only to send her crashing to the ground, the light from his truck spilling over her body. And it’s there, sprawled onto the ground, that she realizes she is in real danger. Because the man in front of her is not one of the Whitetails. She can tell that right away.

He has a shaved head and cold eyes. So blank that Daisy can see her own reflection in them. She looks small and young and so helpless that terror opens up inside of her. A chasm so wide and awful that she clamps her hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming. He towers over her, his silence an echo.

He’s wearing an apron. Which she notices because of the slick sound it makes when he takes a step toward her. The fabric glistens in the headlights like it’s made from some kind of leather or plastic. It reminds her suddenly, unhelpfully of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then all she can think of is the final scene. Of the girl along the road, screaming her throat raw. Daisy scrambles back to do just that, run screaming back toward the Wolf’s Den, but the man reaches out, pulling her roughly back by her injured arm. She cries out, pain rattling through her. He turns her around, examining her face. “Listen,” she says and his grip on her tightens. He smells wild, like wet fur and blood. Something in her brain turns over. She’s never been touched like this. Roughly. Without her permission. Daisy struggles to keep her voice steady. “There’s been some kind of misunderstanding. I’m just passing through and I-“

“Shut up.” Pain shoots through her jaw. If he wasn’t holding her, she would have fallen back onto the ground. She tastes iron, reaches up to feel the mangled skin of her lip. Her eyes flit to his hand, to the gun now shiny with her blood. She stares at him, breath ragged, hands trembling. His eyes are nothing but darkness. “You are weak.” His nostrils flare. “But you have your purpose.” He lifts her up over his shoulders like she weighs nothing. She whimpers when her ribs hit his shoulders, but if he hears it, he doesn’t show it. The man tosses her hard into the bed of the trunk. She lays like a corpse against the chilled surface and then she starts to shiver, so violently that her body rattles against the metal. The truck groans as he climbs in after her, taking her hands roughly behind her back. Daisy can’t find her voice, can’t bring herself to do anything but lay like a rag doll, to let her body go. Whatever he’s bound her with bites at the delicate skin of her wrists. The man rolls her over, ties her thighs tightly with rope, then pushes her over until she falls hard onto her bruised side. She bites back a yelp. The air feels slow again, thick. Her body feels slow too. Daisy closes her eyes, tries to stop shivering. She hears the crackle of the radio, the low drone of voices, and soon the truck’s engine comes roaring to life. She wishes she could scream. Wishes she could scream at the top of her lungs, go running through the brush. Daisy watches silently as the radio tower disappears from view, pine boughs shivering in the cold wind.

Her nose fills with dirt when she lands, and she wonders how a place so deep in the forest could become so dusty. She tastes her own blood. Her hands have gone painfully numb and she almost thanks the man who cuts the ties off her, but the air in her lungs rushes out with a quick kick to the ribs. She lifts her head, finds herself looking through the thin slats of metal bars. The cage is tall, wide, pushed up against rows and rows of other cages. Some stacked on top of each other, some turned violently on their sides, their occupants slumped and silent. In the distance, she can hear screaming. The kind of blood-curdling wailing she was sure only happened in movies.

A loud rap on the bars makes her flinch. She rolls onto her side, hands tingling as they wake back up. The man standing in front of her is a mountain, his shaggy hair and beard singed on the ends, face covered in a black layer of soot. He looks right through her, nodding at a man standing just a little behind him. “Too scrawny to be useful, but she might have some information about the Whitetails. Bring her to me if she survives the night. I’ll have a go at her.” And then he looks at her, full-on. Daisy flinches away, pressing her face into the dirt. “Gonna be a cold one tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3 <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick reminder to mind the tags. This fic has very graphic descriptions of violence. Take care of yourselves <3

She wakes with a fine layer of frost on her skin. Sits up to shake it off, like some sort of fairytale nymph, like a little animal. And then the shivering starts, deep, awful, like it’s coming from her bones. A shivering that feels more like fear than from the chill in the air. In the pale morning light, everything seems clearer, starker. No longer shrouded in darkness, the compound comes into focus. Daisy prefers the dark.

The tall fence all around them is crowned in barbed wire, a green tarp fluttering from across the dirt from her cage. _Train Kill Sacrifice_ written in sloppy black paint across it. Her fear has coalesced. A heavy thing in her chest growing with each breath. She keeps them shallow. The smell is incredible. Like nothing she’s ever smelled in her life. A kennel and a funeral home, the smell of trash left out too long. A metallic, rotten scent that she knows, instinctually, is blood. 

“I thought you were dead.” Daisy starts, searching for the source of the voice. Finds it crouched in the corner of the cage. He’s a Whitetail, she can tell by the shirt he’s wearing. _Resist Repel Remain_ faded and peeling from the fabric _._ He looks awful; hollow cheeks, dark circles under his eyes. His lips are so dry they’ve cracked open; congealed blood thick on his chin. He sniffs, resting his head on his bent knees. His voice is a low whisper. “You’re gonna wish you were dead.” Daisy’s mouth works over words she can’t find, thoughts that have gone quiet even as she scrambles for something to say, to think.

A commotion outside the cage distracts her. She whips around to look. Loud shouting, a hard-metallic thwack. Daisy sits up to get a better look, her heart starting to pound. She looks on in frozen horror as the man she’d seen the night before drags another man across the hard ground between the cages.

The Whitetail in the cage with her doesn’t move, doesn’t even look up, but Daisy can’t keep her eyes off the scene unfolding before her. “Stop him.” Her voice is a harsh whisper. The Whitetail beside her doesn’t look at her, just stares blankly at a spot in the dirt, his cheek still resting on his bent knees. “Someone has to stop him.” She crawls closer, her fingers caked now in dirt, bruised on the knuckles. “They’re going to kill him. They’re going to-“ The sound of the blow echoes, a sick sort of squelch that Daisy finds she can’t look away from. The man’s head has cracked like an egg, his mouth split where his jaw has come undone. His body twitches. _The body hardening after death._ The though comes seemingly from nowhere until Jules bent arms come slamming back to her, the blackened ends of her fingers. But this man isn’t dead. Not yet. He reaches across the dirt, grasping at air, his fingers stuttering. His eyes are full of blood, Daisy knows he can’t see her, but he is looking right at her. Reaching, grasping. The shot is so loud that Daisy cries out. Her scream echos, scattering the scavengers that have been perched on the tops of the cages, the sound of their wings filling the air. The man’s fingers lay still in the dirt, blood spattered above his head like a Rorschach test, like a crown. The soot covered man steps forward, nudging the dead man’s arm with the toe of his boot, letting it drop. Shrugging like he’s lost interest. He nods to another man behind him. “Feed him to the judges.” And it’s just words, just a few words, but they send such an intense spike of fear through Daisy that she bends over and retches. All bile, burning her nostrils, the wound on her lip. It swirls in the dirt, she grips her stomach, hands fisting the soft fabric of her shirt. When she closes her eyes, she’s back in the passenger seat of Jules’ car, tapping her feet on the dash to the beat of the radio. She’s back wrapped in that sleeping bag on the bottom bunk, watching Eli linger in the kitchen, lit by the dim light above the stove. Daisy doesn’t want to open her eyes, but when she hears the slick sound of a body being dragged, she can’t help herself. The trail of blood it leaves in the dirt is dark like tar. The Whitetail beside her looks up. Something passes over his blank eyes before he rests his head again on his knees.

A hush falls over the compound in the evening. The dogs barking and people shouting, even the screaming coming from the high windows of the building in the distance, all seem muted. Artificial light pools in the dirt. When Daisy arrived, the earth was dark, almost black. Now it’s an ochre color, parched as her lips. The air feels thick too, dust motes twisting slowly through it, heading nowhere. There is no breeze, no relief from the terrible smell. And it is _terrible_. And it only seems to be getting worse.

The men who seem to be guarding the compound have been loud all day. Shouting and laughing and, sometimes Daisy was sure, praying. A prayer that would crescendo into a chant, send a ripple through the compound, where even the screaming from the building beyond would ebb. But even they have gone almost quiet at the setting sun. Daisy watches them from the far end of the cage, her back pressed against the bars. She’s been watching them all day, trying to learn that faces, their routines. She’s not totally sure why. It seems fruitless at best and downright dangerous at worst but if she doesn’t give her mind something to do terror will overtake her and she knows, in some primal part of her, that the terror will be her end.

Daisy doesn’t recognize the two stationed across from her now, their backs leaning against the tall, scrawled letters of _Kill_ on the tarp. The two of them have replaced one of the guards she’s gotten the best sense of. He’d looked to be about her age, couldn’t be older than 23, with a tall, broad frame that pulled at the stitching of his tunic, stained dark around the hem. He’d wound a rosary, or something like it, so tightly around his right arm that she would catch the faintest shade of purple in his fingertips when it had been too long since he last adjusted. At times, he’d seemed almost affable. But she probably just wanted him to be.

The sun slips down just under the treeline, and a pale, bluish light filters through the bars of the cage. It should be peaceful, this almost night, should be beautiful, but dread has settled so tightly in Daisy’s chest that she kneads her fingers into her sternum, trying to free up some space to breathe. The temperature is dropping. Her hands are unwieldy, so cold that they’ve gone just slightly numb. It’s hard to bend her fingers, hard to move her lips. She is a singular shrine to pain, stiffer than she’s ever been in her life. And Daisy is, perhaps above all, no stranger to pain. She’d lost her first toenail a year after she started on pointe, yanked it right off her big toe. Her body has ached in some capacity or other ever since. Hips popping, ankles cracking. The way she can’t help but hiss when she finally ices her feet after a long rehearsal. The smell of rosin and powder and hairspray and that sort of specific scent of tulle and muslin worn over and over, year after year, warmed on those rare days when the choreographer opens the windows of the studio and that sweet, golden California air wafts inside. Daisy can see it in her mind’s eye, palm fronds caught in the breeze. Shivering. _Shivering._ A frigid wind comes rolling down the barrow space between the couches, nearly _howls_ when it meets the metal of the bars.

Daisy opens her eyes, hadn’t realized until that moment that she’d shut them. It shouldn’t be this cold, she thinks, it’s not late enough in the year. But they’re high up. She can feel that in how thin her breath feels, in the way the air nips at her raw throat. Even in their coats, the guards seem to be disturbed by the weather, slipping off their gloves to caress the air like the falling temperature is something they can pluck from it. Daisy leans heavily on the bars of the cage. The cold bites at her exposed skin, but the ground is somehow worse and she needs something to lean on, something to keep herself upright.

Daisy lets her eyes flutter again closed. Things are bubbling just under the surface of her mind. She can feel them. The faintest scent of gasoline, a sudden vertigo, a seatbelt pressed to her ribs. She opens her eyes again, focuses on the guards.

 _Praise the Father,_ one says and the other says it back. Like it’s a greeting. Like it has no meaning; like it is so full of meaning there is nothing else they need to say.

 _In the end,_ one of them says, _they will thank us._ The other seems less sure or maybe she just wants him to be less sure, maybe she’s just looking for some sliver of recognition inside of him. Some fantasy where she looks at him with just enough sadness, just enough desperation that he turns the key of her cage. _The reaping is a gift from God,_ he says and she swears his voice wavers, cracks right at the end as his lips roll over _God._

But before the other can reply, a cascading silence tumbles onto the compound. A shiver that rolls down the cages one by one. Daisy narrows her eyes, the dread rising up inside of her so intense that she nearly retches again. She’s never felt fear like this, like the terror could tear her to pieces. So thick in the air around her that she can taste it. 

And then it emerges. In the body of a man. At first, she doesn’t even realize she’s looking at him, doesn’t realize that she’s now gripping the bars of the cage. The Whitetail in the cage with her makes a sound that is both a sigh and a grim rattle in his chest and when she turns to look back at him something turns over in her brain. She can see the other cages through the bars of her own. They go on forever, one after the other after the other and maybe her brain is finally shaking its cobwebs off. Maybe that strange wall that shot up as she went sailing from the car onto the wet road has started to crumble, because the terror that ripples through her is even stronger than before. An almost animal urge to flee leaves her gripping the bars tighter, pleading with herself to stay still, _just stay still._

Her body listens as he crosses in front of her cage. Fight or flight turning easily, instinctually to _hide._ She makes herself small. His bootsteps come to a halt just in front of her and Daisy chances a look up at him. He’s stopped a few feet from the cage, looking off down the line away from her. He leans and says something to the sooted man that Daisy can’t hear. He nods, almost deferential. She can tell the other one is the one in charge here. And not just because he’s nearly a head taller than all the other men. He has a commanding energy, a slow, calculated aura that Daisy can feel even with him looking away. She tries to take better inventory, suddenly acutely aware that his arrival means something, even if she can’t figure out what.

He’s in jeans. Well-fitted jeans that skim up his long, muscular legs. They don’t look as worn as what the guards are wearing, just a dark stain at the hem of on leg and a smattering of dried mud on the knee. They seem out of place here in the grime and filth. His haircut too. Gingery hair shaved close around the edges, kept long at the top, styled smooth back off his face. It’s an edgy cut more at home on the heads of the art directors they sometimes hired on at the company back in LA. All the stranger in contrast to the faded camo fatigues he’s wearing. They look old but well-maintained. He’s rolled them up to the elbow and it’s as Daisy follows that path down that she sees that there is something wrong with his skin. At first, she can’t tell what, narrows her eyes, leans a little forward, and then she can see that his forearms are torn up by scars. Mottled. Painful looking. Burns. Deep, angry burns

He turns his head, like he can feel her looking, and she can see that he has scars on his cheeks too, those burns licking up his face. He stops, turning back to look fully at her, and some small part of her, some inappropriately naïve part of her, feels drawn to the hard, paternal lines of his face. His beard covers up most of his scars, the same gingery color as his hair. But it’s his eyes that draw her most in. They’re the color of a robin’s egg, pretty and soft, but when they meet her own, Daisy rockets back. That terror bleeds back in, and there is something in his stare that is so sharp, so brutal, she can’t help but recoil. The stare goes right through her, through every part of her. She’s in pieces and then he’s gone. Followed closely by the soot faced man and another she hadn’t noticed before. He isn’t a small man but the bent way he holds himself makes him look almost like a child. Misery wafts off him thick as the smoke coming from the harsh, narrow chimneys atop the building in the distance. He glances back at her and she can see that his nose is broken, a livid bruise spread from the tip to his cheek, caked blood that looks so old it’s almost black. Something passes over his eyes. He turns away. So does she. Away from the bars, from the dirt under her. Toward the sky. And then she sees it. A hole. Her chest tightens. It’s high up. The cages are tall, nearly twice her height, but that square of sky is unmistakable.

Daisy straightens up, tries to get her feet up under her. The hole is narrow, but she knows she could shimmy through it. The bigger problem is how high it is. Higher than most would be able to reach. And yet. Daisy crouches again. Waits for the man and his two shadows to pass, until his footsteps, the even tenor of his voice have faded into the distance. And then she stands. The two guards who’ve been lurking across the cage are now watching the man leave with an almost religious reverence. One of them bows his head, eyes closed, fingers tented just below his mouth. Daisy peers back up at the hole in the cage. She has to steady herself on the bars, head swimming now that she’s standing, and takes two steps back, away from the hole.

Her cellmate looks up at her, the first movement he’s made in hours. “What are you doing?” She doesn’t answer him, just bends her knees, braces herself. She can make this jump. She’s made higher ones on stage. Yes, she’s done this jump before. Not quite like this. Not aching like this, not terrified and starving like this, her mouth so dry it’s hard to swallows. But she’s done this jump before and it comes easy, despite everything. Her hands find the top bars with a loud clang.

The Whitetail looks up again. He blinks, like he isn’t sure what he’s seeing, and then he frowns, brow furrowed. He watches her wordlessly like he too is in a dream. Daisy doesn’t say anything, focuses all her energy on hoisting her body up, keeping herself hanging. But everything still feels so slow, so unreal, and when she feels fingers curl around her ankles her first reaction is to lean into it. A touch-starved feeling that disappears when the fingers tighten. Terror replaces it, but that too is fleeting and before she can even cry out, Daisy’s yanked down hard by her ankles. Lands on the dirt floor with a force so intense her teeth rattle.

The first hit is a shock. Daisy expects it, watches the man who’s yanked her down haul back to deliver the blow, and it’s still a shock. To be touched like that. And her first response, springing from the naivest, most sheltered part of her, is indignation. _How dare you. How dare you touch me like this._ But when the second blow lands as he crawls over her, blood spattering from her nose onto the dirt beneath her, her brain catches up to her body. And then she reaches for him, digs her nail into his skin to try and pry him off her. To try and _hurt_ him. There’s a film on his skin, tacky, greasy, and her fingers come back caked in black soot. She looks at them, that dreamy feeling settling over her again. It still feels fake. All of it. Impossible. The accident. That night in the bunker. Eli and his calloused hands and that faded tattoo. The third hit cures her of that. It’s not a dream. She starts to kick. Another thing she didn’t know she had in her. She kicks him hard in the chest with a force that clearly surprises him. And it is, she immediately learns, the wrong thing to do.

He wails on her. Enraged now. What had before felt like duty now has flourish. He’s enjoying this now. She can tell because she can hear, in the furthest part of her hearing, laughter. And she can feel, as he presses against her, hands going for her neck, the hard length of his cock through his pants. And that’s when she knows he’s going to kill her. Knows it without a doubt. _Jesus Christ._ Her hands come up uselessly to try and cover her face, but the man yanks them away, yanks all of her around when she tries to curl in on herself. The pain is an echo. She doesn’t feel it, not really, not like she should, but she can hear it. Hear each blow, hear herself cry out. She hears herself beg. That only seems to inflame him, excite him and she feels the sharp pain of his closed fist across her mouth. Her blood tastes salty and her stomach growls at the taste, starved. She closes her eyes, lets her hands fall limp by the side of her head and wonders if Jules had time to feel her death or if it took her by surprise, too quick to contemplate. 

“Cook.” The world stills, all at once. Daisy opens her eyes, watches at the dust in the air seems to just hang. The man straddling her has frozen, fist above his head, reeling back to hit her again. She doesn’t hear anyone say anything else, but the man gets off her like he’s been commanded. He stands up, brushing dirt from his knees, heading toward the source of the sound. Daisy rolls onto her side, wincing as she does. Her eyes lashes are caked in dirt, her vision narrow and hazy, but she can see in a startling, terrifying clarity that the red-haired has returned. The two men clap each other on the shoulder. The man with the red hair is taller, broader, clearly commanding him, but there seems to be a genuine affection between the two of them. The other man wipes at his face, his fingers leaving streaks in the soot before he heads away, toward the other guards.

With a quick nod from him, the timid man with the broken nose hurries up behind him, opens up a folding chair. The red-haired man sits heavily onto it, knees spread, hands clasped between them. He leans down, head cocked, and Daisy sees the faintest amusement glint across his pale eyes. “Well look at you, little pup. What rabbit hole have you fallen through.” Daisy winces as she pulls herself up off the ground, then falters, landing again in the dirt. The man takes a deep breath, one side of his mouth twitching. “I don’t imagine you know who I am.” He chuckles. “That doesn’t happen much to me anymore.” His voice has a gravely quality, but underneath, a sweet, Southern twang. “My brother has this whole county accounted for, but we can’t seem to figure out who _you_ are.” It isn’t a question. Daisy keeps her mouth shut. “Which was neither here nor there” His lips lift into a smirk that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Until now.” He glances over at the man beside him, nods his head almost imperceptibly. “Put her on the list.” He sniffs. “ _Bottom_ of the list. Half ration of water. No food.” He parts his thigh, eyes sliding back to look at her. “See how she does.”

The man nods. She can see how rigid his body is, every muscle stilled by fear. “Yes Jacob, yes sir.”

She wants to crawl toward them both. Rattle the bars, scream. She wants to scream until her lungs burst. She watches him like prey. Silent, still. Jacob doesn’t look at her again, just groans as he stands from the chair. “And board up that damn hole.” And then he’s gone. She watches as his broad back disappears down the line of cages.

She flinches at the first touch, sure that the other man has returned. But it’s only her Whitetail. He’s crawled across the cage. “Keep your mouth shut.” He says on a whisper, then slots his hands under Daisy’s arms, helping her sit back up. He rips off a corner of his shirt then dabs at her lip. It comes back dark with blood. “I hadn’t noticed that before.” He nods up at the hole. “Probably would have waited ‘til nightfall if I were you. Might not be the best planner but you’re clearly resourceful.” He sniffs, looking out at the crowd of guards that have begun to gather. A scream cuts through the quiet in the air. It ends as quickly as it began. “Resourceful just might get us out of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: graphic descriptions of violence

Daisy doesn’t know how many days she’s been here. That night, Jacob spoke ominously about the next morning but she’s sure that’s already passed, the days bleeding together. But they aren’t leaving food for her, leave only water at the crack of dawn. A tepid half bowl thick with sediment that clings to her tongue as she drinks it. The guard with the rosary beads looks away when he gives it to her, his fingers faintly purple, the beads too tight around his wrist.

It’s hard to count the days and Daisy thinks that might be because of the clouds. Smooth, flat gray clouds that have settled heavy over them. They refuse to yield, overtaken by darkness at night, but stubbornly unmoved when day breaks, blotting out the sun. Day is only degrees away from night, a mottled, oppressive gray. Daisy watches them churn above her, praying quietly for the clean, cold water of rain. A loud, wet cough draws her attention from the sky back to the cage. He coughs again, one hand on his chest. When he catches her looking, he offers her a weak smile, spits on the dirt. Daisy nods, a quiet acknowledgment that she appreciates what he’s trying to do, the little sliver of normalcy he’s trying to make for them both.

Her Whitetail is named Sully. He told her that the first night she met Jacob, and sometimes he tells her, from over the lip of his own rusted bowl, that the weather’s never like this in Montana. Never this overcast, never for this long. He doesn’t say it outright, but Daisy can tell by the _way_ he says it, that he thinks the weather is some kind of omen. Some kind of punishment. 

Sully is from Billings originally. _Few hours southeast of here,_ he told her when Daisy went blank at the name. He has a wife. Gets a sort of faraway look when he talks about her. He has kids. Somewhere. _Hopefully not in Hope County anymore,_ he said somberly one morning as they work to try and split the meager ration he gets into something they can both eat without drawing the attention of the guards. She didn’t ask him to elaborate. Didn’t really need to. None of this is making sense, not in a way her old self could understand. She still isn’t totally sure how this could be happening only a few hours north of the state capitol. The guns, the cages. The blood soaking into the dirt. And Sully doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation, even now that he’s decided to be friendly.

He’s sort of classically handsome, Sully. The hottest dad at the neighborhood bbq, Jules would probably say. A sandy crew cut he keeps tucked away under a worn-out trucker hat. It’s hard to tell his age with how tired and dirty they both are, but there’s something paternal about him, something sweetly familiar. He has no tattoos that she can see, none of the rugged energy that Eli has. Doesn’t give her the same safe feeling Eli had that morning on the mountaintop, but it’s something at least. He’s the type of guy who probably used to go to church every Sunday, stuck around after to help the pastor clean up. He says _gosh darn it_ , says a whispered grace before they eat. One night, when the screams from the building beyond reach an unbearable crescendo, he tells her that he has killed ten men. She’d felt a twinge of shock at the base of her ribs and then nothing, a wave of parched dizziness washing over her.

Their plan is shaky. But it’s theirs and that alone helps Daisy stave off the brutal hopelessness that attached itself to her as she sailed through the air in that storm and hasn’t let go since. It’s feasible, as far as she can tell. Possible even.

It’s mostly Sully’s plan. He’s army. A veteran. Iraq or maybe Afghanistan. It’s hard to focus when he talks sometimes, her thoughts sort of slippery, her vision a little foggy. But the plan is clear enough, her part at least. All she has to do is get back up there, hold on long enough for him to climb her like a tree. She can do that. Even though she hasn’t eaten anything substantial in days, she knows that she can still do that.

The rest is up to him. Sully knows these mountains well, can get them out of here, back to the Wolf’s Den. Back to Eli. _That_ has become her singular focus. To get back to Eli. Because he seems to have a plan, because he seems…she isn’t sure what he seems, really, her thoughts cloudier every day. But there’s something about him that Daisy closes her eyes, leaning heavily against the bars of the cage. If she tries hard enough, she can imagine herself tucked back into that sleeping bag on the bottom bunk, watching Eli speaking softly beside the stove. She thinks about the hard lines of his stomach when he’d stretched his arms over his head. Daisy imagines that he’s strong, capable. Made hard by a life out in this wilderness. She imagines him pulling her from the cage, a fantasy she clings almost hysterically to. One that splinters. Palm trees whiz past her; that dry, warm California air blowing over her legs. Jules can’t decide what station she wants, flipping back between two, the songs chopped to pieces, a whiplash. The palms become rockface, the radio that chug of the wipers as they fight the rain. Daisy opens her eyes, exhales, her breath pluming out in front of her.

“200 days of sun a year in Montana. That’s what we’re s’posed to have.” Her eyes flit to Sully. He has his back to the bars across from her, knees bent, arms resting atop them. He’s looking out toward the tarp, toward the barrels across the way. Their fires cast long shadows across the dirt as the sun sets. He clicks his tongue against his teeth, shakes his head. “Haven’t seen the sun in weeks.” He shakes his head, swallows hard. And then he frowns, lifting his head a little, eyes narrowing. Daisy goes rigid, following his line of sight. She hadn’t noticed the man approach. His steps are quiet, his shoulders hunched. That bruise across the broken bridge of his nose looks darker even than the last time she saw him. He’d followed Jacob around like a lost dog, simpering, hanging nervously on every. Daisy squints at him, eyes darting to either side, surprised to find him here alone. She returns her gaze to him and realizes, a quietly dawning horror rising slowly up her, that he’s a cop. _Deputy_ on a patch sewn onto his sleeve. His uniform is tattered, caked with grime, a dark spot of blood down by his hip. Daisy swallows hard, remembers when she’d begged Wheaty to call the cops, the wreckage of their car still smoldering in the ditch, remembers the bottomless look he gave her. Sully turns, rising to his knees until he’s level with the crouched man. “Pratt.” There’s something tragic about the way Sully says the name though Daisy isn’t sure why she thinks that, delirium still clinging tightly to her. “What are you doing here, Pratt?”

He’s breathing quick through his mouth, eyes darting back and forth, never focusing on one thing for more than a moment. He opens his mouth, lips trembling, then shuts it quickly again. With a quick glance behind him, he leans closer to the bars. “Your final trial is tonight.” And then, just as quickly and quietly as he’d come, he disappears down the rows of cages. Daisy watches as the color drains from Sully’s face. He’s still for a moment. Unblinking. Unmoving. He turns to look at her, nods once, then leans over to pat her on the shoulder. There’s a flash of animal fear in his eyes that fizzles quickly out, eyes tired again, weary. A spike of terror rises up inside of Daisy, so intense she has to hold herself up on the bars, bile rising in her throat. It settles quickly back into that stiff dread that’s sat hard and tight at the base of her chest for days. “Remember the plan,” he says, shifting back to his side of the cage. Daisy says nothing, a lump too heavy in her throat. Sully pulls his legs close to his chest, curls up tightly like he had her first night in the cage. The darkness all around them deepens. Even the crickets fall mute. Daisy watches as flames lick up the sides of their barrels, the shadows like faces, the guards half in, half out of the light.

The southern twang is more pronounced over the loudspeaker. So is the menace. His voice echoes against the rockface, through the trees. And with each word, Daisy runs faster, spurred on by a terror so sharp it has heft, energy. _Find her._ The undergrowth whips at her bare arms as she runs, at her face. She can smell her own blood, taste it. Daisy whips around, still running, to see if they’re behind her. She trips then rights herself, reaching out to steady herself on the thick trunk of a tree, the bark sharp against her palm. _Bring her to me._ She can hear them yelling, hear the undergrowth crunch under their heavy boots. The beams of their flashlights spill over dark leaves, peak around the pines. _This is the will of the Father._ Daisy turns back around. She pushes off from the tree. Every part of her body aches. _Cull the herd._ She runs.

They’d dragged him away and Sully had let them, loose and heavy like a rag doll, his eyes blank, staring at nothing. She hadn’t seen his eyes like that since her first night in the cage; their conversations, their planning had sparked something in them. But as he was pulled out onto the dirt, his eyes were like a corpse’s. Like a man already dead. And that had been it. The thing that broke her, something snapping hard and loud in her brain. She hadn’t remembered the plan, any part of it. Knew only that she needed to do something, needed to do something _now._ Had barely waited for them to make their way down that long line of cages. They’d been working the screws of the patch for days. Daisy on Sully’s shoulders in those precious minutes when no guard watched them. And even though her body felt like brittle glass she’d managed to shimmy through, stood up on the top of that cage looking out at the dark pines shivering against the blue half-darkness of an evening slipping steadily into night. She didn’t know what way she needed to go, how to get back to the Wolf’s Den, how to escape, but as a cacophony of voices rose around, Daisy found, in that still moment, that it didn’t matter. She’d slid off the cage.

They’re gone. She’s almost sure, the forest an eerie quiet around her. All she can hear now are her own footsteps, her heart pounding in her ears. They must have given up on her, must have chased her to some line they couldn’t cross. Or maybe they just think she’ll die out here. A wolf howls in the distance, the sound cutting through the pitch darkness. Maybe she will die out here.

And that’s all she can think about as she stumbles through the undergrowth, the smell of pine so strong it’s sickly, thick in the air. She feels her way through the darkness, her fingers sticky from the sap on the trunks of the trees. The path is something she stumbles upon, something that maybe she’s been following all along, but it reveals itself. Her path steadier, the dark receding as the trees thin out. She has a direction now, a place to go, and she exhales, her breath steaming in the chilly air.

The tall grass along the dirt path is wet with an icy dew, just the earliest line of dawn slipping across the horizon, but the moon is still high in the sky, arcing over the treetops. Daisy has no sense of how long she’s been walking, where she’s headed. Besides up. The air feels thinner up here, the mountain ranges in the distance no longer obscuring the vast, starry sky. The moon is a strange shape, almost full, just a nick off one side. Daisy stumbles to a stop, looks up at it. A tremor rolls up her, a shivering pain. She wants to curl onto the ground, wants to cry and scream and wail, but finds herself instead shuffling toward the edge of the bluff, her breath pluming in front of her, goosebumps racing up her bare arms. Below her, a blanket of thin, reedy birch shiver in the wind, their leaves still clinging to them but the singe of fall on their edges. Further down, pines stand knit needle to needle. In the distance, Daisy can see light below, a curl of thick, black smoke cast against the lightening sky, a pale, gossamer blue. Daisy wavers, her eyes fluttering. Her throat is so dry that her tongue feels unwieldy, her lips cracked and aching. She can feel the dark bruise blooming on her cheek, the ache in her ribs, all down her side. Daisy stumbles along the path, meandering, swerving. She doesn’t have a plan. This part was supposed to be Sully’s. He was the one that would get them back out of the forest, back to the Wolf’s Den. Daisy’s chest tightens. Her lungs feel heavy, sticky almost beneath her ribs. She tries not to think about Sully, about where he is, if he’s still alive. They’d listened to screams for days, smelled the acrid smoke that poured from those chimneys. Daisy can’t think about it, wipes at her swollen cheeks. She wants to cry, wants to curl up so small that she disappears, hidden from the rest of the world. It seems as good a plan as any.

She stumbles, hands flying in front of her, to try and catch her fall knees landing hard on the dirt and pebbles. Daisy closes her fingers into fists and finds herself holding onto a bag. A backpack, she corrects, as she rubs her eyes to try and clear her vision. It’s a hiking backpack, not all that different than the ones she and Jules tossed into the back of her car just a few days ago, the warm California sun at their backs. Daisy presses herself against the pack, holds it tightly to her chest. Something soft, something sturdy. She sniffles, her whole face aching as she does, then glances up, finding there in front of her the tattered remains of a tent, still standing, supported, if weakly, by a single pole. Beside it, the cold remains of a fire and then, every muscle in her body tensing at once, Daisy spots a plastic bottle lying discarded beside it. It’s nearly empty, the water inside of it the same color as the leaves stuck to its outside. But Daisy crawls to it, tipping it over into her mouth. It tastes foul, sediment coating her tongue, but she drinks it all, hands trembling when she finally lets it fall back into the dirt. Daisy leans hard on her hands, trying to catch her breath, trying to keep herself from retching up the bile roiling in her stomach. She glances down, noticing for the first time that she still has a zip tie still wrapped tightly around one wrist. It’s cut deep into the skin, dark blood caked around the edge. The tips of her fingers are the same faint purple as the guard’s. That feeling rises up in her again, that small, terrifying feeling. So intense she grasps at her chest, curling in on herself, forehead pressed to the dirt, her hair falling limp around her face. Daisy stifles a sob, every muscle rigid, like she’s trying to hold herself together. A bird calls from a distant bough, the sound cold and clear in the empty air.

The sleeping bag is damp, sticks unnervingly to her skin, her clothes, but she wraps it around her all the same, desperate for any kind of warmth. The tent is torn so wide at the top that Daisy can see the stars disappear with the rising sun, the sky a pale, clear color. Daisy closes her eyes, pulls her knees up to her chest, trying to make herself small, trying to disappear. Sleep crests over her like a wave. A dark thing, suffocating. She lets it overtake her. 

When she wakes, the sun is brilliant in the sky, warm in the air. She untangles herself from the sleeping bag, wanders from the tent shaky like a newborn deer. Daisy wobbles, steadying herself again on the bag. Just beyond it, across the remains of the fire pit from her, a dark trail of blood leading off into the tall grass. Daisy turns her back to it, her breath ragged and shallow. She heads back the way she came. She doesn’t know where she is, doesn’t have even the faintest idea. This way is as good as any other.

She’s not looking where she’s going, she’s looking at the grass. The tall grass that hems in the uneven path she’s taken down the mountain. It’s livid with color. Pale sage greens and ochre, deep reds and a pale almost lavender purple. No wildflowers this high up, not with the chill still hanging in the air, but it’s beautiful. Daisy wants nothing more than to lay down in those tall grasses, let them rise up around her, curl up like a little rabbit, hidden, warm. The thought keeps her going. All the others – of Jules, of Eli, of Los Angeles – they ignite a panic inside of her so intense she can’t breathe. And so she thinks instead of rabbits and deer. Of little animals, of warm, quiet places. The hollows of trees, little nests at the base of moss-flecked boulders. She slips so deeply into these thoughts that it’s only the sound of voices that pull her out of them. Daisy goes rigid when she hears them, finding herself standing smack in the middle of a road. She looks back from where she’s come, the mouth of the path she took down the mountain nearly hidden by dense brush. Daisy blinks, then turns quickly back toward the direction of the voices. She feels like she’s woken up, her vision clear now. Her heart starts to pound again, right at the base of her jaw. There’s a thin row of pines across the road in front of her. Through them she can see an old, beat-up truck parked in front of what might be a ranger station; log exterior, the familiar flat wood sign all national parks have at their entrances. The voices get louder. An argument, maybe. No…something else. Daisy narrows her eyes, trying to listen, limping over to the other side of the road. She should run, she knows that, but the weariness inside of her is so final, so heavy, that the idea of heading down the road alone is unbearable. Daisy takes a tuft of pine needles in her fist, steadying herself as she breaks through the line of trees. The voices get louder still. She can hear laughter. And one voice, she recognizes. That deep tenor, that faint twang. She walks toward it on instinct, leaning against the side of the truck to keep herself upright.

Eli’s standing at the front of the station, bow in one hand, the other raised, shielding his eyes from the sun. Relief cuts clean through her. She pushes herself off the side of the truck, stumbling out onto the sun-bleached asphalt lot. “Eli!” Her voice is hoarse, cracking, but he hears her, his head snapping to look at the spot where she’s stopped. She doesn’t hear what he says, just watches as he calls over his shoulder, dropping his bow onto the ground. He’s running toward her, the sun refracting around him. Daisy reaches back, searching for the truck, for something to keep her upright. Her fingers close around empty air and for the first time in her life her legs fail her. Her knees buckle. The road rises up to meet her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3  
> Stay safe and healthy, guys. In crazy times like these, I’m grateful for communities like this <3


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for any grammatical mistakes/typos. Quarantine has zapped what little editing power I had to begin with.

He’s quick. In front of her before his bow comes clattering to the ground where he’d tossed it. And he’s solid. Every part of him. A warm wall of muscle. Daisy clings to his forearms, nails digging into his tattooed skin. They sink down together. Daisy trembling like a little leaf, Eli solid as a rock. He’s saying something, looking at her with a kind of intensity she’s not sure she’s ever seen ever in her life, but she can’t make it out, his words. The morning feels too bright, the air chilled. She smells like blood and rot and wet leaves and, probably, surely, fear. Because it’s come rushing back now, sharp like it had been in those first few seconds when Jules’ car started to skid. Nothing like the muted, quiet terror she’d sunk under in the cage. This one is so sharp and so fresh and so close to the surface that she starts to babble. Fearful nonsense that she soon chokes on, tears rolling down her face, snot down her throat. He hushes her, one hand on her cheek as he rocks back to slough his shearling coat off his shoulders. Daisy leans heavily into his palm, chest stuttering as she cries. Wheaty hovers in the background, bouncing from one foot to the other, eyes big as dinner plates. Eli drapes his coat over her shoulders then, his hands tight around her arms, keeping her upright, he gives her a long onceover. His expression never breaks, and Daisy finds herself staring hard at his eyes. A sort of unwavering, almost supernatural calm in them that she tries to soak up. She finds herself reaching for him instinctually, fingers trembling in the dense, chilled air of morning. He catches her hand in his own, squeezes just lightly. “You’re alright,” he says with such an even surety that her jaw unclenches, air rushing into her lungs. Eli turns to Wheaty and yells out. “Radio Tammy. She’s gonna need attention once we get back.” Daisy flinches at his sudden change in volume. Eli keeps his hold on her hand. Wheaty rocks side to side, like he's woozy. “Now!”

He stands nearly at attention, eyes wide again but clearer, like he’s just woken up. “Okay,” he says, turning back toward the trucks, “okay, sheesh.”

Eli slips his hands under her arms. Daisy grabs at him, a sudden unexplainable fear rising up again. A panic that whips through the air. But Eli is steady as ever. “Easy,” he tells her, pulling her slowly back to her feet, “take it easy now.”

He settles her on the bottom step up toward the ranger station. Baked by the now risen sun, the air smells softly of pine. Its rays feel so warm and nice on her face that she closes her eyes, basking, until a rush of vertigo sends her scrambling again. Eli holds her upright, hands firm around her arms. She wobbles toward him. Some of her hair, dirty and matted beyond recognition, brushes against his beard. He smooths is back behind her ears, holding her a little more upright. “Sit up just a little longer. A little longer, alright?” Daisy nods, sniffling. She wants to say something. About Sully, about Jacob. About the feeling, stuck tight between her ribs that he is right behind her, gaining now with incredible speed, and that they’ll all be overtaken now _right now._ She shivers, her tongue heavy and useless in her mouth. The knife in Eli’s belt catches the light. He’s got callouses on his fingers; she can feel them where he’s touching her. “Couldn’t hardly recognize ya,” he says, punctuating the joke with a half-smile. Daisy finds she can’t return it. He presses his fingers gently against her stomach. “Pain?” She makes a little noise in her throat, but her throat is so dry, her tongue like balled cotton, that she can’t bring herself to tell him that _everything_ on her body hurts. He presses again, this time a little harder. “If anything was broken, you’d be howling like a dog.” Eli pulls her arm gently from his coat, grimaces when he sees that the wound has opened back up, but says nothing, tucking it again in the sleeve. He pours some water from a canteen on his finger and Daisy watches hungrily as it drips onto the dirt. Finger relatively clean, he settles her back, pulling her lips up to examine her gums, peering long at hard at her eyes, flitting from one to the other. “Well, you’re not gonna bleed out today.” Eli unscrews the cap on the canteen again and offers it to her. “But I’m sure that may not be much consolation.” Daisy yanks the water from his grasp, turning it nearly upside down, the water rushing down her throat, over her cheeks. She chokes on it, heaving over, water pouring from her mouth and through her nose. Eli takes the canteen from her, sets a heavy hand on her back. “Slow down, sweetheart, slow down. You got all the time in the world now, okay?” He looks behind him and calls something to Wheaty that Daisy can’t make out. There’s a roaring in her ears that’s getting louder with each passing second. It fades to an almost eerie silence when Eli hands her the canteen again. She can hear everything. The faint whoosh of birds’ wings through the air, the buzzing of bees as they land softly on flowers now perked up by the sun. “We had patrols out looking for you. Wasn’t sure if you’d run off back toward civilization or what.” He takes her free hand, rocking back on his haunches like he’s going to ease them both up, but then he stops, eyes narrowing. Daisy follows his gaze to her own wrist. One of the zipties is still around it, the sharp edges embedded in her skin, a long, almost straight line of crusted blood around it. “Suppose it would have been too much to ask for you not to end up in his clutches.” Eli pulls the knife from his belt and cuts the tie off in a single, smooth motion. Daisy’s fingers prickle and she leans into his warmth as he kneads his own fingers into her palm, along each knuckle. “Though I would like an answer for why the hell you wandered off in the middle of the night.” Daisy opens her mouth, but the roaring starts again in her ears before she can reply. She wobbles, rocking backward toward the step, away from his hold. He tightens his grip. “Hey, stay with me now.” Daisy nods but her eyes are sinking slowly closed. She feels warm, like she’s slipping into water. Eli shakes her, just enough for her to pry her eyes open again. “Hey.” She narrows them, frowning. That water sloshes around in her stomach and a quick spike of nausea has her closing her eyes again. She just needs to sleep this off. Just needs a little rest. Eli shakes her again. “Daisy. Keep your eyes open alright?” She whines, twisting away from him, but he holds firm, shaking her until her eyes flutter open. “Stay with me, you hear? Just a little while longer.” Daisy nods again, tipping forward. She presses her face on the collar of his fatigues, feels his muscles tense, go still. He smells like pine sap, like open air, a whiff of sulfur, like fireworks after they’ve burnt out. And he’s warm, so warm.

Daisy’s eyes flutter closed. He’s saying something to her, hands tightening around her arms. “Okay,” she says, though she doesn’t know what to. “Okay,” she says again, her voice hoarse from screaming or disuses. It’s hard to remember. She leans heavy onto his shoulder. Lets darkness come rolling over her.

She wakes shaking, tossing, scrambling. Her nails find skin and dig in and the hiss she hears makes her feel, for a moment, a sense of almost buoyant triumph. Then she gains elevation, feels herself lifted up into the air and starts frantically in again with her nails. “Hey, hey hey.” Daisy opens her eyes, finds herself reaching up toward Eli, the soft lines on his face. Her breath feels slow on the exhale, the world suddenly snapping brightly back into focus. She’s half in, half out of the truck, the dense pines in all direction a stark departure from the ranger’s station’s gravel drive. Eli pulls her all the way out, hefts her up, one arm behind her back, the other under her knees. She scrambles to wrap her arms around his neck, his beard scratching her already raw skin. “It’s alright,” he says, low so the other Whitetails heading up the path can’t here, “I gotcha.”

Daisy lets herself lean against his chest, lets that terror settle down, slink off somewhere new and deep inside of her. A wind comes rustling through the trees. So hard they stop to brace, branches whipping, trunks groaning, Above them, the sky is bright robin’s egg blue, cottony clouds drifting quietly through it. Daisy closes her eyes again, tucks her head close to Eli’s neck. Smells pine sap, open air, fireworks after they’ve burnt out.

Daisy can’t stop looking at the scar. She tries to focus out toward the middle distance. On the rust on the sink, the steam spreading up the mirror above it. Her gaze drifts always back toward the scar. Deep and pink, a palm’s length below her bellybutton. Unmistakable. Tammy bristles. Daisy looks again at the sink.

She’s in here with her because Daisy can’t stand on her own, because she’s unsteady on her own legs, because there aren’t that many women here to begin with. She’s here and dressed only in a pair of old shorts and a worn bra because the water from the shower won’t stay put, kept spraying all over her shirt. _No use wasting another load of laundry,_ she’d said as she stripped down. Tammy lathers up a cloth and gets to work on her arms, scrubbing a little harder than she should at the wound. The pain echoes inside of Daisy but slips easily away. The room is echoey, dark and metallic. She looks again at the scar. Her own mother had one. Almost identical. Six long inches from hip to hip. “Where are your kids now?”

Tammy flinches like she’s been hit then frowns, scrubbing a little harder with the cloth. “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“Sorry. Shit, sorry I didn’t even…” Daisy swallows, eyes flitting up to look at Tammy’s. She’s pretty. Sharp, wide cheekbones. An upturned, button nose. Daisy’s never seen a woman look as tired as she does. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”

Tammy’s face softens. “It’s fine. Best not to be asking questions like those around here though. Do you some good to remember that.” Daisy nods, lips pursed. The silence between them swells then Tammy takes a deep breath. “Lean down. Let’s do your hair.”

She’s toweling herself off on the toilet when Tammy clears her throat. She’s dressed again, that worn old cardigan thrown over her shirt, but there’s something stiff about her that hadn’t been there before. Something brittle. “He touch you?”

Daisy blinks at her, towel hovering just over her bare knee. “What?”

“Jacob or any of them.” Tammy won’t meet her eyes, looks off instead at the blank corner of the bathroom.

Daisy looks down her own body. She knows every inch of it. Every joint, every sore muscle, every little twinge after a long day at the studio. She knows the contours of it and even now, splattered with bruises, it’s familiar. “I don’t really know…”

Tammy looks her full on now. “Did they _touch_ you.”

Daisy sits bolt upright, every hair on her body standing on end. She remembers how cold the ground had been as she’d laid sprawled out onto it. “No.” Tammy just looks at her. “ _No._ There wasn’t anything like that.”

She nods, looking away again. “Eli was worried. Wanted me to ask.” She sniffs, straightening her sweater. “Not usually Jacob’s style, but…things are ramping up.”

Daisy wraps the towel around her shoulders. The hard water has made her skin feel tight and dry, but it’s a relief to be clean, to be warm. To be alive. “What does that mean? Ramping up?”

Tammy nods toward the clothes folded neatly on one of the bathroom’s metal shelves. “Get dressed. You should get some sleep.”

“What time is it?”

“It doesn’t matter what time it is.” And then she’s gone, leaving Daisy alone in the dark, quiet room. Her thoughts expand, threaten. She tamps them down, wrapping the towel tighter around her.

“You’re up,” Eli says it without looking at her. Heading from the door to the little kitchen across from the couch. The room’s mostly empty, just Walker snoozing on the couch, the tv a quiet static, and Eli’s footsteps echo.

Daisy turns to the sound of his voice, finding him rummaging through the fridge, the light casting a pale glow across his body. He’s in the same fatigues, the same faded jeans, but his hair is slicked a little back like he’s just come out of the shower. “Yeah.”

He shuts the door, takes a long breath, and looks at her. “Tammy would fuss about you not resting.”

Daisy turns from her spot on the bottom bunk, setting her feet firmly down on the concrete floor. They’d found an old pair of athletic shorts for her to wear, a t-shirt three sizes too big for her with _Hope County Cougars_ emblazoned on the front. It slips across her shoulder as she turns. “But you?”

He sighs, taking a nip from his canteen. “I know this ain’t really the kind of thing you just sleep off.”

Daisy stands, wincing as the movements twists her ribs, and pads quietly toward him. He leans back against the kitchen’s scuffed laminate counters. “I wanted to thank you.”

“You don’t need to.”

Daisy scoffs. “Yeah, I really do.”

He hands her his canteen. “You really don’t.”

She takes a sip. It sits unpleasantly at the base of her throat. “Well, thank you anyway.”

One side of his mouth ticks up, just for a moment, before he turns his back on her, rummaging again through the fridge. “Wheaty said you didn’t eat much for dinner.”

Daisy slides up onto the counter. Eli turns to look at her before quickly turning away. The wolf’s den has a dreamy quality at night. A hush that makes everything feel slow and sloppy and a little unreal. She shuts her eyes, imagines, for a moment, that she’s still in the passenger seat of Jules’ car. She can almost feel the sway of the road, can almost hear the radio. Daisy knows Eli is waiting for her to say something. She opens her eyes. “My stomach’s a little…” It lurches, tightening.

“I’ll bet.” A beat of silence passes between them, eyes locked, before he clears his throat. “I got a little something.” He bends down to rummage in the cabinets. “Tastes like hell, but it’ll settle your stomach.”

Daisy squirms a little from the countertop. There’s something about the proximity, about the fading lines of his tattoos. He smells like soap now, this close up, like the bland, drying soap they have sitting on the floor of the makeshift shower. “What is it?”

“Couldn’t pronounce the name. It’s ground-up roots though. Medicinal shit.” Eli stands, sets a dark bottle on the countertop. The liquid inside looks thick, old. There’s a residue on its lip that Daisy cocks her head to get a better look at. “Trick I picked up in Iraq.”

“Iraq.” She glances up at him again. “What were you doing in Iraq?”

Eli chuckles, pouring some of his canteen in a glass. He drops a few beads of the liquid into it and Daisy watches and it swirls and darkens the water. It smells herbal, like the dandelion tea her partner last season used to drink before rehearsal. “Fighting.”

Daisy’s eyes widen. “Oh fuck. Sorry, I didn’t mean to-“ The knock startles them both.

Tammy lingers in the doorway from the radio room, raps her knuckles again on the frame “Boys at the Park Center ran into some trouble.” Eli straightens up. “We have some shit to fix.”

He nods, kneading a spot at the back of his neck before turning to look again at Daisy. “Get some rest now, alright?” And then he’s gone, following Tammy into the far room, the hum of radios louder now that Daisy’s alone. The room swells around her, her heart pounding now. She spreads her fingers onto the cool countertop and closes her eyes. Someone tied flowers to the cross for Jules, their heads beating against the wood in the wind. Her shirt is the same as Sully’s cap. It had fallen off his head when they dragged him out. Her chest stutters. She bites back a sob.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3\. I hope all of you are doing okay in these crazy times.


	7. ~update~ not a chapter!!!!

Hi guys! Long time no talk haha. As you've probably noticed, this has not been updated in a couple of months. This fic is absolutely not abandoned. I have a lot planned for it, but just need some time to figure out how I want to structure things etc, etc. It may be several months before I get another chapter up for this fic. I really appreciate all the support I've gotten and thank you so much for your patience <3 


	8. Another Update! Not a chapter (sorry)!

Quick update on this fic! I have almost all the new chapters outlined and a few of them drafted. I’m going back through the chapters I've already posted and doing some revising on style and structure. Nothing major plot or character-wise will be changed, but I just wanted to tighten things up before I start posting on this again. Which will (hopefully!) be in the next week or two! I’ve really appreciated all the support I’ve gotten on this fic and am very excited about the direction I’m hoping to take this.

Also: I have a twitter now! Come chat with me! <https://twitter.com/EbabelN>

Thank you so so much again for all your patience and support :) 


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